Taking a look at PC-BSD 8.0 (Distrowatch)

After having tried and reviewed FreeBSD 8, Jesse Smith has now taken PC-BSD 8 for a spin, and he’s overall very pleased with the speed, ease-of-use and the hardware support for his desktop PC. He is also very impressed with the PC-BSD Installer and its Package Manager.

He concludes his review with:

While on the topic of other operating systems, it’s hard for me, as a long-time Linux user, not to constantly compare PC-BSD to the penguin. Usually, these comparisons turn out favourably for PC-BSD. For example, PC-BSD runs faster on my systems than most of the full-sized Linux distributions and it generally used less memory. My notebook has an Intel video card and it’s a card that has tripped up some of the more popular distros, but PC-BSD handled it without any problems. Likewise, sound worked on both of my machines without any tweaking, a feat Linux isn’t always able to match. Some people might not like the PBI self-contained packaging approach, but the OS supports more traditional forms of package management, ensuring PBI files do not have to be used.

After using PC-BSD for a week, I’m very impressed with the project. With the exception of some of my notebook’s hardware, I ran into no serious problems. Fortunately the live DVD makes it easy to test hardware before committing to installation. The installer is a work of art, the package manager is easy to use, even for less experienced users. The desktop is attractive, stable and responsive on my machines. The documentation, which builds on the FreeBSD Handbook, is first class and the system’s defaults are reasonable. Having popular codecs and Flash pre-installed is a nice touch and makes PC-BSD ready-to-go straight out of the box. In my opinion, this operating system isn’t quite as user-friendly as Mandriva Linux or Linux Mint, but it’s not far behind and, on my hardware, it performs faster. In my eyes, PC-BSD is ready for The Desktop.